Blue Gill Fin Rot?

Hello, I have a 1/4 accre pond fed by an artesian well over flow. The pond is 3 years old and has walleye and bass and a few trout in it . I recently caught a dozen or so bluegills all healthy and placed them in the pond . Within a week they started dying and all have deterioated tails and fins. Now all are gone. All other fish are healthy. Any one have any ideas. I don't want to kill anymore gills.

I would look at the differing features of where the bluegill came from vs the pond you put them in, that is water quality, temperature etc. It's also pretty easy for a new fish to get fin rot in times of great stress, especially after they're hooked, transported, and relocated. It could be that the bacteria in the pond simply took advantage of a weakened fish. You may want to quarantine any future bluegill and allow them to recover from the initial capturing process. Then you could perform a more delicate acclimation process.

Personally I would bet that it was caused by the transport. Then like Josh said, the transport stress opened them up to infection. How did you transport them? 100% pure salt added at 1 tablespoon per five gallons of water can be of great help. Also cool well aerated water.

Skipjack, you said add salt to the fish during acclimation period? Should I do this before putting any fish into my aquarium?

I have always traveled with it. At least one tablespoon of salt per 5 gallons. I have always kept my tanks salted at the same level, unless I was trying to grow plants. Really, it will help a lot to eliminate some stress, and infection.

I suggest having the water pre-salted in the collecting bucket as soon as you start fishing. Stress-induced ion loss begins immediately, and it makes the skin and fins susceptible to bacterial and fungal infections.

If trout are present then temperature is well below optimal for growth of bluegill. Also being spring fed, check for high concentrations of dissolved N2. The stress of transport very likely figures into this as well. I would not be happy as a bluegill being so moved.


Something sort of similar we had with bluegill acquired from springs of the Suwannee River drainage. Virtually every fish acquired began to show necrosis of fins after only a couple hours in hauling tank even with addition of salts and antibiotics. Losses were high even though antibiotics helped. We then constructed a decompression chamber that the fish stayed in over night following capture using dipnets. The chamber with fish was slowly moved up and downstream to help with fin problems (we assumed the bends involved). Fins still underwent necrosis and it started just as quickly as will fish handled with seine and placed in to fish hauler. I still think dissolved gases were problem and possibly stress on fish made it hard for them to handle it. Something was clearly not right for these habitats because the bluegill were not spawning in it them unless you went a good ways down stream. Even the spotted sunfish were having issues but they seemed more tolerant.